I’d like the ability to create a new group with items selected from the results of a search. The new group could contain replicates of the selected items.
Thinking more deeply about this, what I’d really like is a virtual group mechanism – smart groups? I can imagine something similar to smart playlists in iTunes and smart albums in iPhoto '04. It would be a very powerful way for grouping items, regardless of their location(!), and contribute to making DEVONthink a more complete content management application for those of us attempting to use it that way.
I think Apple would do well to integrate that functionality at a system level so any application is potentially capable of using it, similar to what was possible with BeOS/BFS (which I never used so I’m vague on details) while learning from its mistakes. They hired Dominic Giampaolo, author of the original BFS implementation, who’s been working in the file system group for awhile. My bet is that something interesting will emerge from there, hopefully as soon as the next release of OS X. HFS+ is a bottleneck. Microsoft realized that with NTFS and is responding with Longhorn’s WinFS.
Products like Rage Software’s Smart Folders and projects like Bruce Horn’s iFile are interesting but are probably crippled without better filesystem support.
And DEVONtechnology is certainly interesting in this context, all which seems more apropos for the DEVONtechnology Questions & Answers subforum instead of this one.
